The morning came, everyone’s still alive and well, time to continue our little adventure. Is everything going to stay the same? Can it?…

I bet those two (and maybe you guys too) have already forgotten where they’re even going, ha! Anyhow, we’ve reached a village, so sensitive people please be warned, there are some dead cartoon people on the next page.

What can I say… Hanami is almost over. At least the first batch of sakura trees has already started to loose petals. But fret now, there are many kinds and varieties and after the white ones we’ll have pink ones and then late ones and then you can always go somewhere north or to the mountains. As for me, I feel like I’m starting to dislike the whole hanami thing due to the crowds. They’re very tiring. Hopefully, they’ll all calm down a little from now on, since everyone probably already took their hanami photos for 2018.

What else, work’s good, but it’s still hard to work on Replay, the secret project I’m making with the 4LS (involves both writing and drawing) and my personal project (writing, no time left for drawing, sadly). Aaah I regret not having maybe two additional hands.

And guys, I’ve updated the vote incentive! Seems you’ve already noticed, lol. Thanks for the votes! I also received an awesome demon fanart, special thanks to Onceller!
Plus if you’re interested I think we have some Corporal positions left so grab those if you want me to draw you an avatar! The one below was made for Navic Panther, thank you for your support!

58 comments on “Rzepki”

I thought this was just a story about two people and their problems in the midst an apocalypse 😛
Joke aside – they are still on their way to fetch the book – or have you changed the script XD

Still crossing my fingers for your projects – hope you can juggle them all without problems and if you have to pause Replay (i know this will never happen) – i think all of your followers are on one page with that 😉

And its normal to start hating crowded places – even if its something beautiful, the more people there are the more you will lose focus on the part you wanted to see – sometimes it only helps to find a place where the crowds are not so strong – and most of the times this brings you to places , that are even more interesting 😉

Well, they can always eat that field of rapeseed in the background if they get hungry. At least I assume that’s most likely what it is; and the flowers and leaves (and seeds) are edible.
Of course I don’t know how good Robert’s and Ada’s botanical knowledge is; so for all I know they might be perfectly capable of starving while surrounded by acres of edible crops.

“Rzepki” felt like a super common random village name. It’s not a hint regarding the actual geographical location. But I was curious if you can figure out what the name means (because all village names have a meaning, right?).

Ah, well, that’s good to know. It’s not a situation where you’d want there to be confusion. Of course I don’t know the polish word for “knees”, so I wouldn’t know what he’s threatening to break.
Or the word for “break”, come to think of it.
Maybe I should just try to stay away from polish-speaking gangsters.

Surprisingly, it’s not actually that common: openstreetmap.org knows only one village and five hamlets by this name. (Along with another village and three more hamlets where “Rzepki” forms only part of the name.)

Funny thing is, some of these actually have fields and mountains nearby… Though I couldn’t spot any wind towers on a quick glance 😉

Actually, no, not plausible at all. As far as I’m aware, the electricity grid would collapse within minutes without constant human input.

Balancing the grid is an extremely complex task, that is only partially automated. (That’s why blackouts sometimes cover large areas: when any part of the grid goes down, if the neighbouring parts can’t react and isolate it quick enough, they become unbalanced and go down too in a sort of chain reaction…)

The only things that are likely to still be up, are autonomous micro-grids — but these are very rare in the “industrialised” world, where it’s usually easy to get a grid connection. (And most of those that do exist today, are powered by diesel generators — so they only stay up until fuel runs out…)

There are proposals for a more resilient grid, composed of autonomous cells, with their own storage etc., that can temporarily balance themselves much like micro-grids, and only reconnect with other well-balanced cells. But that’s not what we have today.

Also, even if the grid could maintain itself, there is another problem: since most people likely didn’t turn off their appliances before being ripped up by demons 😉 , I suspect the load on the grid would be much larger than what renewable sources alone can supply today in most parts of the words — so any generator still connected, would be hopelessly overloaded and blow out immediately…

Note that even if you have a traditional solar installation on your rooftop, regulations require it to turn off when the grid goes down, for safety reasons. (Though this is about to change, now that residential batteries are becoming commonplace — these can properly disconnect themselves from the grid, and work as an independent micro-grid when paired with a solar installation.)

The way things stand today, pretty much the only electricity sources available, would be those that were never grid-connected in the first place, i.e. the sort of small diesel generators and solar panels used on-demand for camping or other events, or sometimes installed permanently in very remote places. (So Ada actually *might* have that sort of thing at the cottage, as it seems to be in the middle of nowhere…)

The funny thing is that such stand-alone generators (especially solar ones) are much more common in parts of the world that don’t have complete grid coverage, including large parts of Africa, as well as parts of India and its neighbours… So during an apocalypse, they end up having more electricity than we do 🙂

(Temporarily, you can of course use any car as a generator — but with pretty limited power; and extremely inefficient — so it would run out of fuel pretty soon… And for the record, the pumps at gas stations don’t work either when the electricity grid is down.)

I highly doubt that those were tears of remorse over his behavior. The kindest potential reading of that that I can think of is he was crying over finally realizing that he’ll never have the relationship with Ada that he wants, and can start to move on.

Most likely scenario, he was crying out of self-pity, and now he’s going to close up emotionally and pretend last night never happened and nothing’s changed between him and Ada, until that baits Ada into blowing up and trying to confront him about it, and he’ll be right back to trying to guilt her into boning him with some barb like “What, I thought you were used to pretending like my feelings for you don’t exist! I’m just playing along!”

That’s likely just a temporary state — I wouldn’t assume for now that it necessarily means a worsening of the situation on a grander scale… At least from Robert’s point of view. We’ll have to see how it plays out in the end…

Sure, it’s entirely possible that this sort of thing has happened before, and I was simply giving Robert too much credit and he’s been a shit man from the start. But from an outsider’s perspective, a man who’s been amicable up until this point going “If you’re not romantically and physically attracted to me, then you’re an awful witch who’s leading me on, and I’m completely blameless in this situation.” is some pretty heavy fucking damage.

Even worse, it’s a stance taken by so many gross awful dudes in the real world, so seeing it in Replay just has all of my hackles up. This is the first beat in so many truly, tremendously shitty “””romance””” stories, repeated so often and so predictably that if the story starts to look like it’s going to be all “Robert is right, and justified, and Ada is a cruel and awful person for not feeling and thinking and doing exactly what Robert wants her to” I am dropping this whole thing like it’s coated in contact poison.

As for “some aspects of his behavior were arguably questionable”, I don’t even know where to start. Try treating any person in your life the way Robert just treated Ada. See if they’ll ever speak to you again.

I’ll point out again — more explicitly this time — that Robert is *not* reproaching her for not wanting physical contact. He is only complaining about her supposedly sending mixed signals. The way he does this is certainly controversial, and it’s not clear whether it’s really justified. But there is nothing fundamentally shitty or gross about expressing that sentiment.

On the flip side, if Robert is right about it, that doesn’t make Ada an awful person — just naive.

Well, unless she did it on purpose, to gain favours… But there is no hint of that here. (Also, if he offered favours in the hope they would buy him booty, he’d be at least as much to blame… But there is no hint of *that* either.)

As for the sort of story you describe, I can’t think of any examples from the top of my head — though I can well imagine a certain kind of people being inclined towards writing such stories… But I think it should be very clear that this one here is not that sort of story.

I don’t plan painting anyone black or white, they both made mistakes. There is a huge difference between a dude you knew for months demanding affection because you confused him for some reason and your best friend whom you knew for years and years being hurt by your behavior and is sick of the situation. Please don’t forget that those two know each other better than we all know them. It’s easy to judge but it will most likely be a bad judgement.

( ‘ ‘ ) / Allo’
Haven’t read this in a while (regretting that) just caught up.
OYE AUTHOR! Outta curiosity, have you considered posting Replay on Webtoons, alongside this site? Could attach links between the sites. Free, easy way to attract more readers, and bring in some extra $. Webtoons pays it’s most popular creator. Sad this comic isn’t known enough, it’s better than almost all the other things I’ve been reading recently.

Yeah! I plan to do that after I’m done fixing the prologue. I was wondering if posting it in a webtoon form would be very hard to do… well, I’ll do it eventually! And thank you, I’m super happy you like it!

Sweet! Looking forward to supporting you without paying $! <3 this!
(broke highschooler entering undergrad, about to be broker. Probably gonna be on welfare
after getting a masters, lol… WHY CAN'T THE U.S.A HAVE GERMAN EDUCATION POLICIES WHYYYY)
Just thought I'd mention it after seeing Shilin do it, http://carciphona.com/
I got 0% experience with digital media / digital stuffs like this, could try asking her, have a feeling she'd be willing to give advice if you need it. Haven't really contrasted / read the webtoons version of Caciphona much, (have a little) but I have a feeling it wouldn't take much effort to repost everything you've done. Pretty certain you don't need to reformat anything at all, pages would just be vertically stacked, user would scroll down, etc. Just throwing this idea out there, ultimately tho –
~ ( ' v ')~ Your comic, your life, your choice.